Posted
by
kdawsonon Friday August 08, 2008 @12:05PM
from the big-chests-big-brains-you-do-the-math dept.

Death Metal Maniac writes "The team analyzed the DNA of 13 genes from Neanderthal mitochondria and found they were distinctly different from modern humans, suggesting Neanderthals never, or rarely, interbred with early humans. The genetic material shows that a Neanderthal 'Eve' lived around 660,000 years ago, when the species last shared a common ancestor with humans. Neanderthal brains were on average larger than those of modern humans."

I think they mean "last" as in last point in time. My brother and I have a common ancestor in my maternal grandfather, for example, but our "last shared" common ancestor would be our mother (or father).

"Neanderthal" is German, and refers to Neander Valley. The spelling is historic and remains in Latin/scientific words and in English. Neander Valley is now spelled "Neandertal" in modern German and English. There is no/th/ sound in German, so the German pronounciation would be with a hard/t/ sound (and an 'ay' for the first e but that's picking nits).

Neanderthal Man is the pervasive English spelling, it was originally "Neanderthaler" in German but is now similarly spelled "Neandertaler". As noted abov

Upwards of 10% of all children aren't biologically related to their (supposed) fathers. The book "Sperm Wars" has a brilliant treatment of this and much much more (too effing lazy to link, so use google or something).

ok, this is a study on michtochondrial DNA.. So if a Neanderthal impregnated Sapiens it wouldn't show.

I went to a talk where a professor seems to have found evidence of a gene that "invaded" sapiens 6-60k years ago.. One of the genes known to tweak brain development. Anyway the gene managed to outcompete it's sapiens homologue (it's now 20 ish percent of the world population), not that anyone really knows what the advantage is..

Well, since all life is presumably derived from a single-celled organism, everything has a common ancestor really.

What the article was trying to say was something like the latest common ancestor or when they diverged, although I think you probably realize that and are picking at the semantics. And I'm up for sem antics.

And since I guess its possible there are other species that diverged from either line after the split, it might not be quite correct to say "humans and neandertals diverged from each other..

Nothing really surprising here. The multi-regional hypothesis crowd will still complain that it's mtDNA, and not nuclear, and thus can be ignored, while for everyone else it simply bolsters the Out-of-Africa theory that the common ancestor of Neandertals and modern humans was H. erectus, and the Neandertal line spread throughout Eurasia, spending a few hundred thousand years there before modern human expansion out of Africa, for whatever reason, knocked them into extinction.

Two independent life forms could make the same right vs. left handed sugar choice with 50% odds. I find 1 in 20^64 magnitude odds more convincing: specifically the genetic code [rcn.com].

All life just coincidentally decided that CAG was going to mean glutamine? And with the exception of a few codes in mitochondria and a few eukaryotes, the hypothetical multiple genesis also gave us random agreement on the meaning of 63 other codons? No. If every cell on Earth agrees on 55 out of 64 codes, and most agree on all 64, it's a very safe bet that their translation machinery was an inheritance from the same ancestor.

Although, the likely explanation for that is that life was more uniformly distributed and at some point, the ones with the commonalities happened to out reproduce the others a little. It wouldn't even take all that much if it's a positive feedback, and the way living things "recycle" the bits of other living things they've eaten, it probably is. (i.e. it takes less energy to convert or filter if the food already contains the proteins you need in abundance)

All I'm refuting is the idea that there was no common ancestor to all the life we know of today. It's entirely possible that there were multiple genesis events but that our ancestral cells wiped out all the competition.

I'd still bet against it, though. It seems like the "first mover" advantage would be too great; any potential competition would be eaten before it even got to the stage where genetic codes make sense.

It's not one single celled organism - it's one species of single celled organisms. This is never explicitly made clear when people refer to the last universal common ancestor - the term doesn't refer to an individual.

With horizontal gene transfer being as common in prokaryotes as it is, it seems more likely now that the root of the tree of life is probably a tangled bush of its own. It's quite likely that early single-celled organisms were swapping genes even across species lines (and remember, species tends to me something different when you're talking about a lot of prokaryotes).

Why? All the evidence from the basic genetic machinery itself suggests the exact opposite. There is no extant life form on this planet yet found that doesn't fit within a single tree. Admittedly the bottom of that tree is bush-like because of probable horizontal gene transfer, but you pretty much have to have similar genetic mechanisms for that to even work.

Well, since all life is presumably derived from a single-celled organism, everything has a common ancestor really.

That's assuming that several different single celled organisms didn't come into existent and being to evolve independently (or that if they did, only the descendants of one still remain). I'm going to guess that if we have any hope of life being common in the universe, that in an environment as conducive to life as Earth, that life sprung up in several different locations.

I can't agree with the second part of your post -- an all-out war with England could have resulted in absolute genocide for India, as in there would be no India or far fewer Indians today -- but I do have to agree with the first part. Just because they were more primitive doesn't mean they were more violent. As science has shown before, even our Stone Age ancestors might well not have been as violent as we are. Cooperation, as opposed to conflict, with spread out societies was to their advantage in trade fo

Just find the history of the pakistan secession and read about his role.

And btw, Gandhi did actually had this to say about the holocaust. He was alive and very powerfull during said holocaust, after all, so judge for yourself how moral this guy actually was:

The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined co

While offtopic; I was buying a tv a couple months ago, a best buy salesman openly insulted me, calling me an idiot, for not purchasing service by their geek squad to adjust my color and contrast for me. The service cost as much as the tv.

He claimed it would extend the life of the tv, but had no idea from or to what. I guess he was right, I was an idiot to try and buy a tv that won't last without adjusting the contrast.

If the Neanderthal had bigger brain, there is a possibility that they had a civilization. That civilization might have discovered fire, internal combustion engines, rockets and even 27KM long particle accelerator.

The last traces of the neanderthal is about 30,000 years ago.

What I want to know is whether or not they found the Higgs boson before they went extinct!

Actually it's the ratio of brain to body mass [wikipedia.org] that really matters. Neaderthals may have had a slightly higher range of brain mass (not much [wikipedia.org]) but they were much more massive creatures. And Neanderthals DEFINITELY had fires, and probably even rudimentary religious or spiritual beliefs. That does not a civilization make, but they are within our same species most agree.

There's a lot of debate as to what human-like abilities the Neandertals did possess. There are only a few burials, and while there does seem to be some ceremonial aspect to them (suggesting at less some capacity to invoke and comprehend symbolism) they're pretty damned primitive. Technologically, the Neandertals spent much of their time on this planet in a stasis. Advancement and innovation was excruciatingly slow, with much of it happening in the final few thousand years when they seem to have picked up on what the invading modern humans were doing, at the very least trying to remain competitive.

Of course, the flipside to that is that anatomically modern humans spent a good chunk of their time on this planet in the same sort of stasis. Sites in the Levant where Neandertals lived and where the first modern humans came out of Africa show that for thousands of years you could tell little difference between the two on technology alone. At some point over the last 100,000 years something changed in the way modern humans' brains were wired that saw a blossoming of symbolic thinking and technological and cultural innovations. Unfortunately, wiring doesn't get fossilized, and the best theory based on very slim evidence seems to be that a major complexification of language, from earlier more primitive proto-languages to fully modern language probably played a big part in this. The fossil evidence suggests that hominids have had the structural ability for a million years or more. We've got a long way to go on this one, and what's going to start to answer some questions is if we can start finding enough Neandertal nuclear DNA to start looking at genes like FOXP2.

Like anything in life or science, there are always exceptions. For a given population of large enough size, the distribution for mature adults fits linearly. A sperm whale has a brain mass of 7.8kg [wikipedia.org], about 6 times ours. They are, however, between 25 and 55 Mg, which is far greater than six times our own mass. Hence, we are smarter. With a larger body, you need a bigger brain to pull off the same feats. It's not that simple, but it holds for the most part.

A sperm whale has a brain mass of 7.8kg [wikipedia.org], about 6 times ours. They are, however, between 25 and 55 Mg, which is far greater than six times our own mass. Hence, we are smarter.

"Hence" we are smarter?

The word "hence" implies a causal link, but I don't see any. You say,

With a larger body, you need a bigger brain to pull off the same feats

but this is awfully weak as explanations go (I'm sure you agree). So I'm still left thinking that E.Q. is a circular definition: We believe that we are smartest, so we looked for a plausible function that "happens" to make us win.

Apologies for trying to simplify things and type less. There's no causal link between a sperm whale size and our brain function, but if you plug and chug those numbers into EQ, we end up smarter. Hence, hence.

We believe that we are smartest, so we looked for a plausible function that "happens" to make us win.

Well, I can't argue that because by that token any solution in which we are smarter fails simply because we want one. But the truth is that there's a reason that humans are smarter than all creatures, that primates are smarter than most, that dolphins and other cetaceans are highly intelligent, that

Well, throw in earlier animals, such as the various dinosaurs, and you'll get some interesting data points that will most likely lie outside your graphs. Add in the parrots that have actual vocabularies of over 100 words, and the entire premise falls apart.

In fact, relative to body weight these colourful birds have brain sizes that are on par with chimpanzees and orangutans.... "Humans have these really big brains, but guess what, parrots have really big brains too. In fact, if you overlay a graph of brain size to body mass for parrots on top of one for non-human primates, they sit in a perfect line"

Oh, and what's with the link to the paper on differences in g between black and white populations? As in, what's your point; what does it have to do with E.Q.? The only connection I could see with our conversation would be if E.Q. were different between black and white populations, but I see nothing of the sort mentioned in the page you linked to -- so I must have entirely missed whatever point it was you were trying to make.

That may be so, but we have plenty of signs that Neanderthals were every bit as evolved as the Cro-Magnons (humans) at the same time.

They did use fire. In fact, occasionally they seem to have even used coal, something Homo Sapiens never really got into until Renaissance. They also cut down trees and used wood extensively. They skinned animals and used the skins. They used traps to hunt, in addition to spears. They built elaborate shelters. Their weapons and tools are every bit as evolved as those of the Cro-Magnons, and they too used tools to build other tools. (A chimp may sharpen a stick into an ad-hoc tool or weapon, and then discard it. Humans and Neanderthals built a wooden mallet to chip a flint axe, to cut a branch, to make a spear. Then keep them.) There are signs of _some_ work specialization, which also involves at least some societal organization and maybe even some primitive trade. (As in, I'll give you a leg of antelope if you make me a good spear.) They not only buried their dead, but there are signs of using grave goods and basically ritual burial. That alone hints at some primitive religion and a concept of afterlife. (You don't bury someone with food and weapons if you expect that he's just dead and rotting, and has essentially just ceased to exist.) But, at the very least, it means they probably had a few abstract concepts there, like remorse. We found stuff from them like a femur with holes drilled in it, very likely a primitive flute or such. They seemed to have decorated themselves with primitive jewellery and paints. That's a few more abstract concepts you need for those. Etc.

Basically, seriously, it's every bit on par with primitive Homo Sapiens. Go look at some forgotten tribe in the Amazon, like the recent ones who were trying to shoot arrows and chuck spears at a helicopter, and the Neanderthals weren't any less advanced than those.

The _only_ puzzling shortcoming about Neanderthals, is that there we found no missile weapons from them, nor any sign that they ever used missile weapons. Which may point at some shortcoming of their brain after all. Still, I wouldn't qualify someone as non-sentient, after they did all I've listed above and more, just because they can't do ballistics.

That may be so, but we have plenty of signs that Neanderthals were every bit as evolved as the Cro-Magnons (humans) at the same time.

I think what you meant to say was "as anatomically-modern humans". They were definitely not as advanced as Cro-magnons, which were the first modern-looking *and* behavorially modern humans in Europe. There's some evidence that in those last years, the Neandertals tried to catch up with the technical prowess of Cro-magnons, but they ran out of time. It was Cro-magnons who ar

But toolkit-wise and behavior-wise, Cro-magnons were significantly more advanced than Neandertals. There's pretty much a line in the sand between Neandertal-dominated Eurasia and the arrival of the Cro-magnons. Cro-magnons were a part of a wave of modern humans that left Africa somewhere around 50k to 60k years ago and ended up everywhere (including, in the last century or so Antarctica). There were earlier modern human populations, the ancestors of the Cro-magnons are their close cousins who branched ou

Here's a funny thought. They DIDN'T go extinct. They just got fed up with this planet.

So, they constructed a generation ship in orbit, disassembled all traces of their civilization and vamoosed. They're out in the OORT cloud somewhere, trying to decide whether they're going to continue on to Proxima or return to Earth and whoop ass.

So, they constructed a generation ship in orbit, disassembled all traces of their civilization and vamoosed. They're out in the OORT cloud somewhere, trying to decide whether they're going to continue on to Proxima or return to Earth and whoop ass.

I hope they come back. I get bored sometimes.

They left the planet long agoThe elder race still learn and growTheir power grows with purpose strongTo claim the home where they belong...

So, they constructed a generation ship in orbit, disassembled all traces of their civilization and vamoosed. They're out in the OORT cloud somewhere, trying to decide whether they're going to continue on to Proxima or return to Earth and whoop ass.

I hope they come back. I get bored sometimes.

They left the planet long agoThe elder race still learn and growTheir power grows with purpose strongTo claim the home where they belong...

If the Neanderthal had bigger brain, there is a possibility that they had a civilization. That civilization might have discovered fire, internal combustion engines, rockets and even 27KM long particle accelerator.

I've fantasized about the same possibilities, and it's fun to contemplate. But how likely is it to be true at this point, considering that we haven't already found supporting evidence? Sure, a few hundred thousand years is a good long time for much of it to be destroyed and ground to dust. Yet if Neanderthals or some other dead race had had much beyond than batteries made out of lemons, why haven't we found even some basic artifacts or ruins from their vehicles, factories WalMarts, and nuclear reactors? We

If we've come to the point where we can permanently scar the earth with steel and asphalt, fling robots at other planets, and embed millions of miles of cables in the earth with just 10,000 years of recorded history, it is difficult to imagine that their entire 630,000 year civilization left less of a mark than 6 skeletons

It's almost as if these "scientists" and archaeologists were completely making up any crazy numbers they wanted (as long as it's less than 300 million and more than 10,000), and couldn't

This is a rather bizarre comment. Hunter-gatherer societies don't support large numbers. Whether it's Neandertals or moderns, if you're a hunter-gatherer, you need, depending on the environment, a rather large area of territory to make your living from (this is leading theory in the Neandertal extinction, that moderns simply out-competed them. 10,000 years ago, at the beginning of agricultural revolution, there weren't exactly a lot of people out there, but agriculture allowed for much more efficient use

Only an ignorant bigot who hates science would say the emperor has no clothes!

I have no idea whether you are a racist or not but you are clearly ignorant on this subject. The only question is whether you are a reasonable rational person who is merely uninformed in this area, or if you are some some fundie zealot who will rant and rave blindly defending dogma in the face of blatant proof it is incorrect.

If you dig in the arctic snow pack, you will find visible yearly layers. For half the year the snow surfac

t does appear that evolutionary science is completely rewritten every few years

Details are being filled in, but it's hardly being "completely rewritten".

Amongst other things, we have a continuous and complete fossil record for a significant chunk of the tree of life in Phylum Foraminifera. A record spanning thousands of species and over a hundred million years, tracing diverse current species back to their common ancestor. Not merely a complete sequence of transitional species, but continuous intermediate f

On carbon dating, and the broader issue of evolution and related science, there are basically two sides making contradictory claims and giving the public contradictory information. Clearly the information from one side is unreliable. Clearly one side is either willfully lying, or is so smug in their certainty of their Truth that they are ignorantly and blindly spewing false dogma. Either way there is one side confusing and misleading the

Since the summary didn't mention it (but TFA did), this is a big deal since unlike previous Neanderthal DNA analysis [isogg.org], this is the first time anyone's published a complete mitochondrial DNA sequence.

it would be interesting to clone this guy. I suspect that we will find more neanderthal material down the road that we can re-create enough of their DNA to make it possible. The hard part is that it would have to be done by a private enterprise. Few govs. would allow this to happen.

wow. So this went from scientific curiosity to see exactly what would be created, to creating slaves/armies, etc.

As to blowing moral limits out of the water, what is the difference between NONE human humanoid, and a sheep? Do you have an issue with Dolly? See, that is the problem. I do not believe that this is unethical. But I know that ppl like you will be putting pressure on govs. not to do this. Fortunately, private enterprise is more likely to do this.

Giving the bizarre sexual practices you can find recorded on line, I find this rather amazing. It just seems that some hard up adolescent cave boy from one species would end up finding some slower running female of the other species more often than that....

That's actually a big argument for why humans and Neandertals may not have been able to produce viable offspring. As the lesson of the European sailors during the Age of Exploration shows, regardless of physical differences between populations, people like to fuck. We're only best by Bonobos in the horny ape department, and if some humans can get off on copulating with sheep and even inanimate objects, it's hard to imagine them not making it a Neandertal.

Not just that, but it's sorta funny when you look at the mitochondrial DNA (inherited strictly from the mother) vs Y chromosome mutations (inherited strictly from the father) for any human invasions or migrations, all the way to the earliest tribes. Invariably you can track the Y chromosome mutations sweeping across the land with the invasion, but the mitochondrial DNA tends to lag behind or even stay put.

Virtually all migrations and invasions _fucked_ their way across a continent. They displaced or killed the males, but then proceeded to "recycle" the newly widdowed women.

It makes sense too, since for most of human history females had a life expectancy of about 2/3 that of men. Birth and birth complications took a pretty heavy toll. So there'd be a steady supply of widdowed men who are still young and horny. You know, given that their life expectancy wasn't high enough to reach andropause. That was in fact a major cause of tribal warfare, and as late as ancient Rome and Greece we find it documented that getting women was an integral part of warfare.

The Romans, for example, demanded women from the defeated Teutones in IIRC 102 BC, in an infamous episode remembered mostly because the german women killed their children and commited suicide rather than comply. They first begged to be at least used to tend the temples of Ceres and Vesta instead, but the Romans refused, and the rest is history.

So indeed it would be mighty peculiar if the same pattern didn't apply to Neanderthals. The offspring must have been sterile or non-viable.

Not just that, but it's sorta funny when you look at the mitochondrial DNA (inherited strictly from the mother) vs Y chromosome mutations (inherited strictly from the father) for any human invasions or migrations

I know i'm being very pedantic here, and the occurrence of this is probably statistically insignificant, but not every woman is XX and not every man is XY. There is at least one XXY woman on record who has given birth, and others probably exist undetected. It may be that the 'Y' from the mother coul

Or perhaps I'm thinking "romatically", but I seriously believe that stories of trolls are the last vestiges of memory of the interaction between humans and Neanderthals. The whole meme just seems to fit so well with the established evidence. This, of course, does not mean a truth - but some part of me wants to believe it is. Perhaps looking at ancient stories from northern societies about trolls or troll-like creatures might provide some insight into their behavior and primitive society. (Matrilineal, etc). Course if wishes were ponies, I'd be up to my eyeballs in manure.

I swear, half the people living deep in the Finnish forest are trolls. They're not recognized as such though, and the males are forced into military service. There they are given assault rifles, violate each and every safety rule during target practice.

It's terrifying. I'm staying near the coast these days.

ps. They don't seem to be allied with the gnomes living in in our major cities.

I think those stories are much more likely to be from recent displacements, specifically the stories that expanding farming populations told about the hunter-gatherers that lived in the forests around them.

There are a number of problems and unexamined assumptions here, starting with the rate of mitochondrial mutation, comparative attractiveness of neandertal females to african males, and african females to neandertal males, and that 13 samples is by no means sufficient to evaluate a race that lived from Gibraltar to England, to Israel, to the Himalayas.

Just because we don't share mtDNA, there could have been human females impregnated by Neanderthal Males. That could have been the case. Plus there are some features in Neanderthals that have been seen in certain European / Eurasian populations.